Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Bullshit Web (2018)

pxlnv.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 112 posts

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#31

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

ineedasername wrote: post #24

>A story at the Hill took over nine seconds to load The Hill is what finally pushed me to install an ad blocker. Before that it didn't bother me too much to get served ads etc that I filtered out of my awareness anyway, but The Hill was unusable. So, I installed an ad blocker and immediately realized how negligent I had been-- in terms of quality of web browsing experience-- in not doing so earlier. The Hill loaded n…

Install the Steven Black hosts.txt or equivalent. Possibly tailor to your own needs (e.g. I allow Twitter, but absolutely no other social media site).

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#32

Post by sacrosanct »

gennarro wrote: post #4

I don’t really understand the complaint. If you don’t like the CNN website, don’t go to CNN or use CNN lite, which has been well documented on HN. No one is forcing you to visit the site. Also, blocking webfonts is trivially easy at this stage so if you have specific complaints then you can take matters into your own hands with little more than a flip of a setting.

CNN has a ‘lite’ version: https://lite.cnn.com/en

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#33

Post by mountainb »

javajosh wrote: post #30

Maybe if you paid for your content it would suck less. The problem is no-one wants to pay for content, so they have to pay for it with ads, which means satisfying the true customer, the advertiser. Google tried, for a while, non-cruft ads, but eventually the demand for more sensational advertising is what drives most of this cruft. Another driver, which is something front-end devs can do something about, is to stop s…

I pay for a lot of content nowadays, less and less of it on the web. I spend far less time on the web than I used to, and life has become better.

The web is just not a very good medium in general and unfortunately the promise of web search has turned out to be just a chimera. Conventional methods of research or specialized search engines are more time efficient. The only thing the web is good for is cheap stimulation, and even for that it isn’t very good.

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#34

Post by Cyberdogs7 »

Cyberdog wrote: post #10

It's an old, old argument, but very true. My first Internet-capable computer had a 14.4k modem - that's a theoretical speed of 14,000 kilo bits per second. But on the whole I don't really remember the web being slower or less usable than it is now, and that was before ad blockers were really a thing. And some of the technologies that we have now but not then could theoretically have made sites load even faster; PNG i…

Your screen name forced me into a double take, as it's very rare for me to come across a similar name.

On topic, the idea of performance optimization seems to be completely lost in large sectors of modern day computer science. My recent experience being windows. I have several old laptops that had been rendered completely unusable through windows updates [one even stopped charging]. However, once replacing windows with Ubuntu, they 'feel' like some of the fastest machines I have. Hell, even the one that wouldn't charge, now charges and works like a charm.

It's sad to think of all the waste, physical, electrical, and economical, that stems from poorly optimized code.

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#35

Post by mysterydip »

abxytg wrote: post #16
Cyberdog wrote: post #10

It's an old, old argument, but very true. My first Internet-capable computer had a 14.4k modem - that's a theoretical speed of 14,000 kilo bits per second. But on the whole I don't really remember the web being slower or less usable than it is now, and that was before ad blockers were really a thing. And some of the technologies that we have now but not then could theoretically have made sites load even faster; PNG i…

> Is an old late-'90s version of Microsoft Word that could run on a machine with 4MB of RAM really a thousand times better than one from today that requires 4GB? 100,000x even. Obviously yes! Even the web -- the things the higher resource caps enable are unbelievable. Yes bottom feeding news sites are worse for it, boo hoo. Have you see the shit you can do in a web browser today? On any device? It's so, so, so much c…

I'm really curious what the "killer features" are of present-day Word compared to, say, Word 97.

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#36

Post by FredPret »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #13
Cyberdog wrote: post #10

It's an old, old argument, but very true. My first Internet-capable computer had a 14.4k modem - that's a theoretical speed of 14,000 kilo bits per second. But on the whole I don't really remember the web being slower or less usable than it is now, and that was before ad blockers were really a thing. And some of the technologies that we have now but not then could theoretically have made sites load even faster; PNG i…

I truly wish I had the data to back this up, but in my memory the web is WAY WAY faster than it was back then even with all of the extra "bullshit". I mean the images were like 16 colors and 200X300, and even just text based sites were slower and latency was worse too. Am I crazy here?

I remember images loading one line at a time. Now I can stream 4k video. Not sure what OP is on about. There is lots of bloat but we are now on a jumbo jet and we used to be on a hot-air balloon

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#37

Post by mandmandam »

javajosh wrote: post #30

Maybe if you paid for your content it would suck less. The problem is no-one wants to pay for content, so they have to pay for it with ads, which means satisfying the true customer, the advertiser. Google tried, for a while, non-cruft ads, but eventually the demand for more sensational advertising is what drives most of this cruft. Another driver, which is something front-end devs can do something about, is to stop s…

> Maybe if you paid for your content it would suck less

Haha, maybe, but I really don't think so. People pay for cable and still get ads; people pay for Netflix and still get ads, I still got ads when on Youtube Premium, etc. Even outside of media consumption, there are countless similar examples.

Perhaps, if content was paid for in juicy frictionless micropayments, the bullshit web would suck less - for a time. But it would begin to suck more and more, until we have the same situation or worse (while still paying, more and more).

The companies pumping out these trackers and selling our data couldn't care less whether people are subscribing to a service or not. They'll offer cash and buy our data until the day that shit is illegal.

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#38

Post by Isamu »

Topgamer7 wrote: post #29
dilyevsky wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But on the whole I don't really remember the web being slower or less usable than it is now We have very different memories then. I very clearly remember everything but very simple html taking forever to transfer over 56k connection

I just turned off image loading by default and would right click and select load image. Generally pages loaded great.

Ha, me too, I turned off images back then and it made everything snappy and very pleasant. I just wanted the text, the information.

It’s weird though- people want all the nonsense. More and more that is the primary use of the web.

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#39

Post by Firmwarrior »

Topgamer7 wrote: post #29
dilyevsky wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But on the whole I don't really remember the web being slower or less usable than it is now We have very different memories then. I very clearly remember everything but very simple html taking forever to transfer over 56k connection

I just turned off image loading by default and would right click and select load image. Generally pages loaded great.

you guys should try and dig up some old home movies of using the computer back in the 90s

Nowadays if something isn't a bloated pile of trash, it'll literally load up in a few dozen milliseconds or less. Back then, even a pretty lightweight text-only site would take seconds to load and render (and of course, bloated crap sites back then took upwards of a minute to load if you left images on)

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#40

Post by numpad0 »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #13
Cyberdog wrote: post #10

It's an old, old argument, but very true. My first Internet-capable computer had a 14.4k modem - that's a theoretical speed of 14,000 kilo bits per second. But on the whole I don't really remember the web being slower or less usable than it is now, and that was before ad blockers were really a thing. And some of the technologies that we have now but not then could theoretically have made sites load even faster; PNG i…

I truly wish I had the data to back this up, but in my memory the web is WAY WAY faster than it was back then even with all of the extra "bullshit". I mean the images were like 16 colors and 200X300, and even just text based sites were slower and latency was worse too. Am I crazy here?

My working theory is that slow behaviors are preferred because else people gets startled.
Post reply on HN